Foresight Nanotech Institute Weekly News Digest: July 5, 2007

Top Nano News of the Week

A new type of memory device has been made by researchers in the US and Italy by attaching individual viruses to tiny specks of semiconducting material called quantum dots. The "hybrid" material could be used to develop biocompatible electronics and offer a cheap and simple way to make high-density memory chips, the researchers say.

…More exotically, such a system could eventually perhaps be used to record its journey through sites of interest in the human body—for example, diseased tissue or arteries. "In Star Trek terms, the hybrids could act like nanomachines or nanorobots built for treating disease," quips [team leader Mihri] Ozkan.

Nanotechnology that's Good For People

A new drug delivery method using nano-sized molecules to carry the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin to tumors improves the effectiveness of the drug in mice and increases their survival time…

In the past, similar drug carriers have improved targeted delivery of the drugs and reduced toxicity, but they sometimes decreased the drugs' ability to kill the tumor cells. Using a new drug carrier, Ning Tang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and colleagues compared tumor growth and survival in mice that were given doxorubicin in the nanocarriers or on its own.

"The study by Tang [and colleagues] is a simple but effective demonstration of the benefits of integration of a drug with an appropriate carrier to yield a striking gain in efficacy," [an accompanying editorial writes]. "May the days of pharmacological missiles that miss their target and friendly fire that kills patients soon be over!"

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara have discovered that attaching polymeric nanoparticles to the surface of red blood cells dramatically increases the in vivo lifetime of the nanoparticles. The research, published July 7 in Experimental Biology and Medicine, could offer applications for the delivery of drugs and circulating bioreactors.

Polymeric nanoparticles are excellent carriers for delivering drugs. They protect drugs from degradation until they reach their target and provide sustained release of drugs. Polymeric nanoparticles, however, suffer from one major limitation: they are quickly removed from the blood, sometimes in minutes, rendering them ineffective in delivering drugs.

The research team … found that nanoparticles can be forced to remain in circulation when attached to red blood cells.

In groundbreaking research, scientists have demonstrated the ability to strategically attach gold nanoparticles … to proteins so as to form sheets of protein-gold arrays. The nanoparticles and methods to create nanoparticle-protein complexes can be used to help decipher protein structures, to identify functional parts of proteins, and to "glue" together new protein complexes. Applications envisioned by the researchers include catalysts for converting biomass to energy and precision "vehicles" for targeted drug delivery.

Line up 250 billion of Victor Lin's nanospheres and you've traveled a meter. But those particles—and just the right chemistry filling the channels that run through them—could make a big difference in biodiesel production.

They could make production cheaper, faster and less toxic. They could produce a cleaner fuel and a cleaner glycerol co-product. And they could be used in existing biodiesel plants.

"This technology could change how biodiesel is produced," said Victor Lin, an Iowa State University professor of chemistry, a program director for the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory and the inventor of a nanosphere-based catalyst that reacts vegetable oils and animal fats with methanol to produce biodiesel. "This could make production more economical and more environmentally friendly."

Advanced nanomaterials such as the newly developed, isotopically enriched boron nanotubes could pave the path to future spacecraft with nanosensor-integrated hulls that provide effective radiation shielding as well as energy storage.

…One of the shielding materials under study is boron 10. Scientists have known about the ability of boron 10 to capture neutrons since the 1930s and use it as a radiation shield in geiger counters as well as a shielding layer in nuclear reactors.

"Boron nanotubes have many of the excellent properties of the well-known carbon nanotubes (CNTs) because they share the same structure," Dr. Ying Chen explains to Nanowerk. "Compared to CNTs, boron nanotubes have some better properties such as high chemical stability, high resistance to oxidation at high temperatures and are a stable wide band-gap semiconductor.

Foresight News

Christine Peterson will serve as Session Chair for the Clean Water panel at the IEEE Sustainable Energy and Clean Water Symposium sponsored by IEEE San Francisco Bay Area Nanotechnology Council. Register by July 6 to obtain the early discounted rate.

Now, for the first time, the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems will describe the R&D pathways and products resulting from this ultimate technological revolution. Join us as we explore the power of advanced "bottom-up" nanotechnology in this 14th Foresight Conference on Advanced Nanotechnology.

Do you believe that nanotechnology will give society the ability to tackle the hard challenges facing humanity? What's your priority for nanotechnology: cancer treatments and longevity therapies, sustainable energy, clean water, a restored environment, space development, or "zero waste" manufacturing? Or perhaps there are potential nanotech scenarios you would like to prevent.

If you would like to help influence the direction of this powerful technology, please consider becoming a member of Foresight Nanotech Institute. With your support, Foresight will continue to educate the general public on beneficial nanotechnology and what it will mean to our society.

Members receive the Foresight Nanotech Update newsletter. For a sample from the archives, see the interview of Anita Goel, named one of MIT Technology Review's top 35 innovators and an early winner of the Foresight Distinguished Student Award. Says Goel: 'I am betting on portable diagnostics. I have already placed my money on and time into it. I believe in it. I want to see this technology delivered to the world." Join Foresight and help steer nanotech in the directions you personally support most!

Foresight Partners

Plan to attend NanoScience + Engineering, one of the largest and most important technical conferences covering developing technologies at the nanoscale, current and future applications, and the environmental, health, and safety issues that must be addressed.

Nanotech Research

Foresight note: DNA is one of the most versatile tools that have emerged in the effort to develop productive nanosystems. Aiding the uncoiling and manipulation of DNA will increase the ways in which it can be used.

Toward Productive Nanosystems

Foresight note: Using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to make and break individual bonds is a very direct way to build nanostructures. This result is an exciting first, but it is not yet clear if it can be extended to enough molecules to be useful in the development of productive nanosystems.

A single hydrogen atom has been snipped off a molecule and then added back on again, marking the first time a single chemical bond has been broken and reforged in a controlled, reversible way.

The researchers used a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) for their cutting tool, which works by manoeuvring a sharp metal tip close to an object, applying a small voltage, and measuring the trickle of electrons that flow between the two.

A bio-friendly nano-sized light source capable of emitting coherent light across the visible spectrum, has been invented by a team of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of California at Berkeley. Among the many potential applications of this nano-sized light source, once the technology is refined, are single cell endoscopy and other forms of subwavelength bio-imaging, integrated circuitry for nanophotonic technology, and new advanced methods of cyber cryptography.

Nanodot: A sample from Foresight's blog

At one of the Accelerating Change conferences I saw Prof. Beth Noveck introduce for the first time her ideas on improving patents via peer review. Now, the nanotechnology field will be envious to hear that another field has been chosen to carry out the first pilot project—software, as reported in IEEE Spectrum:

"The patent examination process has been a closed process without public participation except to the most limited extents.

"It's a new idea to open up the process and create a structured program on the Web that would allow people to provide input on the basis of expertise…

"The advantages to participate if you're an inventor are that the USPTO will allow your invention to get a better examination because the public is participating and to have the application reviewed faster. All applications that go through the pilot will be reviewed out of turn—in other words they'll be taken first—and if you think about the fact that there's now over a four-year backlog in this area of patents to get examined, being examined out of turn and having one's invention reviewed in the course of less than a year, which is what the commitment is, I think is a tremendous incentive to participate."

That is indeed a strong incentive. The nanotechnology patent area has similar delays, I've heard. So when can we give this a shot too? Molecule geeks can benefit from open source-style processes just as much as data geeks. If this catches on, perhaps we can then start to ask the bigger, harder questions, such as: should all fundamental, tax-funded research be patented? Might the public benefit more from sharing than from monopolies, at least in some cases? Just asking!

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Dr. James Lewis, Research Analyst at Foresight Nanotech Institute, is the editor of the Foresight Nanotech Institute Weekly News Digest. If you would like to submit a news item or contact him with comments about the News Digest, please send an email to editor@foresight.org

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